Business: Manufacturer of Attachments for Equipment used in Construction and Timber IndustriesNature of Work or Scope and Results

A leading manufacturer of construction equipment excavator buckets and booms, wanted to upgrade their facility capacity. The purpose of the project was to efficiently capture key criteria from the staff to develop a new plant layout and detail layouts that would include welding robots.

SCG's role was to enhance the productivity of the data gathering and solution development. During the initial project phase, the measurement criteria of the layout were developed (e.g., capacities, constraints). Then, SCG provided material flows and a facility expansion computer based model. By entering such variables as WIP turns, expected orders, order profiles, the model accurately predicted the floor area requirements of the facility.

The facility floor area was defined in terms of process (equipment) area, preprocess queue area (common to all equipment in a process group), raw material storage, and other significant areas (e.g., aisles. shipping/receiving, etc.). It used the available standard labor time to predict the machine cycle time (using a ratio unique to each process).

As a new annual order profile was entered, the labor and floor area requirements were extrapolated. The model showed the dramatic effect of WIP turns on the facility. During the final layout review meetings, SCG obsoleted an existing WIP storage methodology with a more floor area efficient approach. In addition, some process-oriented areas were converted to work (multi-process) areas to improve overall efficiency. In summary, a new factory layout was developed in a relatively short period of time.